SHANGHAI, Xinhuanet -- Chinese scientists have launched a herbal
medicine gene database project which is expected to combine
traditional Chinese medical science with gene pharmaceutical technology.

Chen Zhu, director of the China Human Genome Center at Shanghai said
at the ongoing 2002 International Human Genome Meeting that gene
technology would be used to decode the mysterious effect of
traditional Chinese medicine.

The project, named "the world's largest native compound gene
database", will detect more than 5,000 effective elements of
traditional Chinese medicine and put them into the herbal medicine
gene database.

"Human genome technology has brought vital changes to the bio-
pharmaceutical industry, and China will make it a platform to develop
traditional Chinese medical science," said Chen Zhu, also
vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

For thousands of years, the Chinese have used mixtures of plant and
animal bones to cure disease with a success rate that continues to
baffle modern science.

With the completion of the international genome research in 2003, Chen
noted, scientists would fully understand the "human genetic map",
making further research into genetic information relating to human
disease and lifespan possible.

After the native compound gene database is established, Chinese
scientists will use all the 5,000 effective elements discovered in
traditional Chinese medicine to test disease-related human genes, in a
bid to decipher traditional Chinese medicine.

"It's a tremendous project," a Chinese scientist involved in the
research told Xinhua. The most famous Chinese medical encyclopedia
"Bencao Gangmu" (or "Compendium of Materia Medica") records only 1,892
herbs. Another medical book "Zhonghua Bencao" published in 1995
contains over 8,000 herbs, and the native compound gene database will
cover the most important of these plants.

Professor Wang Qiaochu of the Shanghai University of Traditional
Chinese Medicine has succeeded in curing insomnia by using leaves of
groundnuts, but it's hard for him to explain how the herb works.

"Traditional Chinese medicine has existed over thousands of years, and
a qualified doctor must recite hundreds of prescriptions by heart
which have been passed down for generations, before he practises
medicine independently," said Wang. He added that only within the past
century had scholars of traditional Chinese medicine started to probe
the mechanism and effective elements of these treatments.

Sir Walter Bodmer, a gene researcher from Oxford University told
Xinhua that the greatest difficulty in combining traditional Chinese
medicine and gene technology was to detect which elements of
traditional Chinese medicine were useful or futile.

"This is why we should build a herbal medicine database first; we must
find out the pathogenesis, which is an urgent task for all the world's
top scholars gathered at the meeting," he said.

"I hope that some day a Western doctor can give a prescription of
traditional Chinese medicine by using information from the herbal
medicine database," said Wang Qiaochu.